– Martina Buchelová’s feature film debut turns a turbulent romance into a loose, semi-documentary-style, Gen Z mosaic of intimacy, anxiety and comic disarray
Adam Kubala and Michaela Kostková in Lover, Not a Fighter
Slovak filmmaker Martina Buchelová world premiered her feature-length debut, Lover, Not a Fighter, in the Proxima Competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. At first glance, the film centres on the turbulent tragicomic romance between two young adults, Miša (Michaela Kostková) and Andrej (Adam Kubala). Yet Buchelová quickly expands this relationship into a loose, episodic portrait of a generation navigating intimacy, family dysfunction, and uncertainty.
Miša is shy but clear-headed, while Andrej is more volatile, struggling to keep his drinking – which has repeatedly disrupted his relationships – under control. He lives with his grandmother (Jaroslava Pokorná), also sharing the flat with his socially awkward cousin, Peťo (František Beleš). Around this central couple, Buchelová builds a mosaic of micro-stories: Andrej tries to manage his self-destructive impulses, Peťo searches for a social circle in which he might belong, Miša processes her disappointment in Andrej, Miša’s sister (Mia Sofia Arpášová) wrestles with the awkwardness of her first high-school love, and her gentle, soft-spoken father (Jaro Vojtek) becomes a newly converted doomsday prepper, obsessed with building a bunker to the rest of the family’s dismay.
Lover, Not a Fighter is less a conventional romance than a narrative patchwork, composed of non-linear episodes, digressions and comic vignettes involving Miša, Andrej and their wider orbit. The fragmentary structure gives the film the feeling of a generational ensemble piece, with the central romance functioning less as a plot engine than as one strand in a broader portrait of young people trying to make sense of themselves and each other. Buchelová’s debut is as free-spirited as it is freewheeling. Its series of impressions loosely gathers around Miša and Andrej’s relationship, whilst also sketching a wider emotional landscape marked by anxiety, loneliness and the pursuit of happiness in an unstable society. Crucially, Buchelová doesn’t approach her characters through heavy-handed psychologising or generational diagnosis. Instead, she observes them with lightness, allowing their contradictions, awkwardness and small absurdities to emerge.
The film’s cinematography, by Adam Mach (Victim, Summer School, 2001), favours a raw, semi-documentary-style immediacy, with handheld camerawork, frequent close-ups and occasional smartphone footage. The approach lends the film an unvarnished, generational texture, while shifts between regular lenses and phone images suggest a world in which private experience is constantly mediated by digital habits. Buchelová also injects dry humour by way of intertitles which frame individual scenes, lending the film a lightly self-aware, almost meta-textual quality. In one haphazard encounter with Andrej’s father and his new, much younger girlfriend, for instance, the title announces: “Andrej’s father is in love. And broke.” This situation-based storytelling feels preferable to a seamless linear plot. At times, the film’s looseness takes it onto risky anecdotal ground, with some episodes landing more sharply than others. But, ultimately, Lover, Not a Fighter captures a state of drift without turning it into fashionable despair, and its humour prevents the material from sliding into a solemn statement about youth in crisis.
As a debut, the film is modest in scale but driven by a slightly punk sensibility. Its porous, freewheeling structure isn’t always to its benefit: some inserted vignettes feel less meaningful to the development of character or plot. Yet in other cases, this same looseness allows Buchelová to widen the film’s emotional and generational scope, such as when she abruptly inserts a flashback where we see Miša’s younger sister being preyed on by a man her father’s age. Without prior foreshadowing, the scene is jarring, but it also sharpens the film’s sense of generational anxiety and vulnerability. Its most persuasive quality lies in its refusal to flatten Gen Z experience into an overdramatic psychosociological probe. Instead, Buchelová offers a playful, tragicomic and sometimes messy snapshot of young adulthood, where romance, family dysfunction, self-sabotage and comic absurdity coexist as part of the same unstable emotional weather.
Lover, Not a Fighter was produced by Ninja Film and NOCHI FILM. Aerofims are handling the movie’s Czech theatrical release on 17 September, while Asociácia slovenských filmových klubov will manage the Slovak release on the same date.
